Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Georgia for introducing this bill. It has so much common sense. It is so scary that our country has gone so far downhill that we would allow young people, sometimes as young as 14 or 13 years old, to take powerful drugs, puberty blockers, or do surgeries on them in the name of this idea that we, all of a sudden, have this epidemic of transgenderism, which is something that nobody ever miraculously seemed to know about 50 years ago.

Instead, in our society, we have all the helping professions, the guidance counselors, the psychologists, and the psychiatrists, as well as our pop culture icons from California, out there pushing our poor young people into the idea that it is cool to be transgender.

In fact, recently, it has come out that the number of kids who are transgender, and I think it is 18- or 19-year-olds, has been cut in half, which proves what anybody with commonsense knew all along: It was a cool thing created so that young people could say: Look at me. I am transgender.

The life of some of these kids is ruined. It is a testament, by the way, that this is not genetic. All you have to do, Madam Speaker, is look at the fact that these kids have to continue to take powerful drugs even after surgery. If it was a natural thing, then you wouldn't have to keep taking the drugs.

In any event, I strongly hope we take up this bill.

I should also point out that last year doing doorbells, like politicians do, I ran into two grandparents who had one granddaughter and one grandson going down this rabbit hole. I felt so sorry for them because when somebody makes this decision, it affects not only themselves, but it affects the whole family.

In any event, I am glad the bill is introduced. I hope they have the common sense in the Senate--they probably won't--to pass the bill.

Madam Speaker, I would like to interject a little bit of common sense in the deportation debate we have had going on here.

No one knows exactly how many people are in this country illegally. I think it is safe to say that under President Biden that number went up by about 8 million, which means almost certainly it is over 15 million.

There are some muddled up people here who claim that all we should do is remove the illegal immigrants if they are breaking the law. That, obviously, makes no sense.

I applaud President Trump and Kristi Noem for trying to remove all people who are here illegally, otherwise we have no immigration law in the first place. If someone comes here illegally and all they have to do is avoid committing a serious crime, then we have no country.

Our next President will wind up getting another eight to ten million people crossing here, together with the increased welfare costs, housing costs, and government services it applies, together with the change in culture in the United States away from the culture that we have had that has allowed America to go so long.

I thank Donald Trump and Kristi Noem.

Madam Speaker, I will one more time point out what should be the most important issue facing this body in 2026. I have talked before about the huge marriage penalties that we build into our income transfer programs, also known as welfare programs.

When you add up the penalties that you have to endure if, say, a single mom marries a husband with an income, and we look at the food stamps, the low-income housing, the earned income tax credit, the TANF check, and the Pell grants, you can easily wind up in a situation in which you are penalized $25,000 a year if you get married.

This is the primary reason why, in the 1950s, we only had about 4 percent of the newborn children in this country

born without a mother and father at home, and now, we are over 40 percent.

It is not difficult if people in this body would meet with some average people rather than the lobbyists or the big campaign contributors. It is very easy to find young people today who are not getting married specifically because they find that the Federal Government has almost a policy of punishing people who get married.

Even the Republican Party in its big, beautiful bill has, as I count--maybe there are more--three programs in which we are penalizing married couples. I found out today on the tuition credits for private schools that we are supposed to brag about, there is a big marriage penalty there, as we punish people who want to go to private school who are married.

We also increased the low-income housing tax credit so that more and more Americans are in housing in which they are discouraged from getting married.

They are also, by the way, discouraged from working harder because in all these programs, in addition to being penalized for getting married, there comes a point where if you take on overtime or get a raise, they begin to take the benefits away from you.

That is what they do in the low-income housing tax credit. If you are paying so much in rent and decide to work overtime or decide to get a second job, the housing development will have to say: Sorry, you are working harder, so we have to raise your rent. That is another thing we should be looking at and trying to change.

Madam Speaker, a third penalty comes in a mild increase in Pell grants with regard to technical schools. In order to get it, a Pell grant is another one of those programs where a person can't work that hard and can't be married to somebody with an income.

In any event, I implore my colleagues and implore my leadership team to see what they can do in the year 2026 by not penalizing Americans for getting married and not penalizing Americans for working too hard so we try to work our way back.

There was a time with stronger families--I realize all families can succeed, and I know all sorts of families who do succeed by being very conscientious with their children. Nevertheless, I think we would all agree America would be better off if we worked our way back from the 42 percent of children born without a mother and father at home back down to the 6 percent or 5 percent or 4 percent that it was in the 1950s or 1960s.

Mr. Speaker, I am grateful to be a cosponsor of the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act.

I remember when I was a child I think the average high school student weighed, whatever, 20 or 30 pounds less than they do today, and we had nothing but whole milk. Whole milk was distributed for lunch to all the children. We were taught from first or second grade and onward that calcium, vitamin A, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and all the nutrients that are necessary are in whole milk. I think this is one of the reasons God gave us a body in which whole milk clearly tastes better than 2 percent milk and way better than skim milk.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to strike a blow for freedom and to bring the healthiness of our children back to what it was 50 years ago and pass the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act.

Mr. Speaker, as we adjourn for the weekend, I would like to address three issues which affect Americans, these are issues I don't think have been discussed quite as much as we ought to.

The first issue concerns this transgender situation. We spend a lot of time talking about guys in girls' sports. This is a problem that ought to be dealt with. I think it polls very well.

Of even more significant concern is that of our out of control psychiatric profession treating this as a genetic problem in which people should have to have surgeries to deal with this.

They have surgeries on young people, people as young as 16 or 15 or 14 years old. These are surgeries that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Just as bad, they give puberty blockers to these young people, not knowing what the long-term effects will be.

Recently, new information that should have come as a surprise to no one--but perhaps will come as a surprise to the mainstream media--a new study came out showing that the number of young adults identifying as transgender plunged by nearly \1/2\ half in 2 years. It exposed what a lot of us knew all along. It was largely a social contagion. It was not a genetic disease that required surgeries or permanently changing people's lives.

As I pointed out before, this does not only affect the people themselves who may have puberty blockers and surgeries but it affects the parents. It affects the parents who will never have grandchildren because their children were roped into this by the liberal news media, by the liberal psychiatric and psychological associations, and by hospitals who made money off of this deal.

I am really afraid this is something, since it is a nationwide problem, that should be dealt with in Congress--and I think it will be dealt with soon--in which we begin to refuse this sort of treatment and, even more, refuse these surgeries to people under the age of 21.

Can we honestly say that we would advise someone who is 20 or 19 years old to have surgery, permanently altering their body for the rest of their life? Think how our ideas on life have changed. Think how our opinions on life have changed between when we were 18 or 19 or 20 years old and when we are 45 or 50 years old.

The know-it-alls in the psychiatric and psychological profession are encouraging people to have surgeries. They are giving people puberty blockers. I am afraid the U.S. Congress will have to step forward and say ``no.''

I hope our leadership team in the near future puts something forward that says--and it really should be greater than that. A person can't be a Congressman until age 25--it should at least go to age 21. We need to put an end to this and stand up to the psychiatric and psychological associations. That is one issue I think we ought to deal with.

Mr. Speaker, I will now deal with another issue, and this kind of deals with Social Security. Right now, there are older people who make the mistake of retiring and getting Social Security. All of a sudden, they would like to go back to work and make more money, but they are unable to.

Earlier this session we played around with the Social Security trust fund in which--or at the end of the last session in which way too many people voted for giving more Social Security dollars to some governmental employees; it was about $24 billion a year.

Rather than encouraging more people to retire, if our leadership team wants to encourage more people to work, which we should, we should increase the amount of money that a senior can make before their Social Security is taken away.

Right now, if a person makes more than $19,500 a year in Social Security, when they get to that point, the government begins to take away a person's Social Security check. Right now, we are in the business of trying to discourage people from working if they are 68 or 69 or 70.

Let's pass the Senior Independence Act which increases that amount from $19,500 to $30,000 so that the older people who need a little bit more money can earn it. Even more, it is good for people to work. If these older people want to get out of the house and get a little more social stimulation by working, then they are not penalized for doing so.

I strongly encourage our leadership team. I realize that they will say that it will encourage more people to retire early and might cost the government a little bit of money, but we had plenty of money to give people who were retired to encourage people to retire last January.

Let's encourage and free up older people and let them work a little bit more.

Of course, we have a labor shortage problem. It will also be good for our economy as we see a few more people going to work, maybe working 30 hours a week instead of working 20 hours a week. As I said, we want to boost our economy a little. There are so many businesses who so desperately looking for some more labor, particularly the retail outlets out there and there are some factories, as well. We are particularly finding now that we are kicking people out of this country who are here illegally and were working, it would be great to have more 60 to 69-year-olds working. I hope our leadership will find a way to pass the Senior Independence Act and allow seniors to make $30,000 a year.

Now, the third issue I want to deal with comes under 14(c), which is the provision which allows people who are having some physical problems, spina bifida, Down syndrome, and other problems, sometimes paraplegics, to work.

Given the current situation, in order to make it financially viable to have them work, they have to work for under minimum wage. Nobody ever forces people to do this, but they do it to earn a little additional money. Most of these people are on SSI. They don't need the money to pay the mortgage or pay the rent, but they would like to have a little bit more money to buy some of their own clothes, perhaps buy gifts for parents, what have you.

There are really misguided people out there who are trying to get rid of 14(c) certificates, and, in essence, make it against the law to pay somebody $4 or $5 or $6 to work because of problems that are out there. I have right now formed a caucus called the Congressional Disability Employment Caucus, which is dedicated to the preservation of the 14(c) program. It will provide a little bit of structure to the effort to continue to allow people with differing abilities to have the freedom to work for a little bit smaller amount.

I think it is just horrible that some people want to take away this freedom. I believe in counties in which this freedom has been taken away. What happens is people who, right now, are working for $4 or $5 an hour wind up in what they call day services, and they sit around and watch television or

maybe they are taken on a trip somewhere, but they miss out on the enjoyment of work. They miss out on being like their siblings in which they are able to work today and some, to a degree, support themselves.

I think it is just tragic when this is done and they are deprived of the freedom to work. I will encourage all of my colleagues to track down 14(c) employers in their district and see how meaningful it is for these people with differing abilities to be able to work and to be able to earn their own money.

It is not just an economic decision, it is a social decision, as well. One of the things that scares parents or guardians who are dealing with people in this situation is: What is going to happen to them when the parents are gone? Are they going to have any friends? Are they going to have any social structure?

Moreover, even more than people in other jobs, the social structure provided by people and employers that use 14(c) certificates does provide these folks with friends. We all to a certain extent socialize with the people we work with, but especially for these people, it is important to have friends outside their immediate family.

When you begin to shut down these employers, Mr. Speaker, you are depriving these people of the friendships that they will form in employers who give 14(c).

First of all, I beg my colleagues--we all like to get reelected--I beg my colleagues to tour facilities with 14(c) certificates, and see how happy the people are who work there. See how important both economically as well as socially it is for these folks to have the freedom to work in these facilities. I hope Congress stands up to the freedom haters who want to deny these folks the ability to work in a little bit different setting that they want to do.

There are three issues that I ask Congress to take up and consider. I want Congress to pass whatever legislation is necessary to make sure we always protect the 14(c) certificates. I ask Congress to take up raising the amount of money a senior can make before we take away their Social Security, both for the good of the overall economy, as well as the financial and social health and social assistance of our senior citizens.

Finally, I ask Congress to do something to make sure these out-of- control, lack of commonsense psychologists, psychiatrists are not able to give puberty blockers or surgeries on people under the age of 21.

As I said, we should ban it, even above that age. I have certainly sat and heard people talk about how they regret their surgeries. It seems in our society when it comes down to drinking and when it comes down to smoking, age 21 is the limit in which we allow people to do more. If any of my colleagues would want to introduce an amendment to age 25, our forefathers didn't feel we were qualified to be Congressmen until we were age 25, I would be happy to go for an age 25 limit, as well. I would like to be debating that in conference next week.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 18 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday next, December 15, 2025, at noon, for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I thank President Trump and his Secretary of Defense for acting resolutely when it became apparent a boat full of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, was coming across the Caribbean Sea.

Every year in this country about 80,000 people have been dying. It used to be over 100,000 people killed from illegal drugs. For far too long, wimpy Presidents sat there, watched it happen, and didn't do anything.

Finally, President Trump stepped up to the plate when he heard that there was a boat coming with enough fentanyl to kill millions of Americans. He acted resolutely. I am sure he had lawyers who told him he could and lawyers who told him he couldn't. He said, I am going to err on the side of saving tens of thousands of American lives.

Mr. Speaker, I recently found out that I knew somebody whose son died of a fentanyl overdose and how horrible that must be. The rest of their life must be devastated. I am glad President Trump feels their pain, and he is acting strongly in this situation.

I thank President Trump.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, December 12, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the previous speakers for their kind words and assistance on this bill. I also will address the Fair and Accountable IRS Reviews Act.

For decades, Federal laws required that before the IRS can impose penalties on a taxpayer, an agent must first receive written approval from that agent's immediate supervisor.

Congress put this safeguard in place to ensure that penalties are imposed fairly, consistently, and with appropriate oversight. A supervisor's signature helps prevent the use of penalties as a pressure tactic and creates a transparent record that benefits both taxpayers and the government in collection and appeals proceedings.

In recent years, unfortunately, a regulatory interpretation complicated the intent of this longstanding statute. Instead of adhering to the clear requirement that an agent's immediate supervisor must approve a penalty at the time of the initial determination, supervisory appeal could be obtained at any point in the process and the term ``immediate supervisor'' was broadened beyond Congress' original intent.

As a result, an agent could propose a penalty without prior review and later seek approval from a wide range of individuals, weakening the transparency and accountability that the law was designed to ensure.

The Fair and Accountable IRS Reviews Act restores clarity. It reaffirms that an IRS agent's actual immediate supervisor must provide written approval at the initial determination of a penalty, ensuring proper oversight from the start. This simple clarification strengthens the taxpayer protections and promotes a consistent and reliable penalty process.

Mr. Speaker, Americans deserve a tax system that is fair, predictable, and transparent. This bill moves us closer to that goal.

I thank Chairman Smith for his leadership on the Committee on Ways and Means and all of the Members on the other side of the aisle who helped shoot it out of the committee on such a bipartisan basis. I thank Chairman Smith for his commitment to strengthening fairness and accountability within our tax system.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, it is hard to believe that not even 7 weeks have gone by since Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered in Utah.

I am, quite frankly, a little bit disappointed at the degree to which I do not feel that this body is doing enough to memorialize this great man's short life. I, myself, am reading books by Charlie Kirk to familiarize myself with what drove him to be such an active force in American civil life.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that the rest of this body familiarize themselves with the books and familiarize themselves with why so many Members on the left could not contain themselves, apparently even horrifically with glee, that Charlie Kirk was shot.

I ask particularly my Republican colleagues to familiarize themselves with his writings and let his writings inspire us for the next 13\1/2\ months of this term so that we can begin to accomplish all of the wonderful things he wanted us to accomplish, which he so eloquently pointed out where we were failing to accomplish them.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to comment on that last debate for a second. We are in danger in this country. One of the ways we are in danger is that there are certain politicians who are becoming more and more prominent and who have a contempt for the average American.

Sadly, I have seen this happen more and more over time in the Democratic Party. We have seen it in their higher offices where Kamala Harris was handpicked by the billionaires. We saw it where everybody else had to clear the decks for Joe Biden to become President after these offices were determined and nominees were determined for many years in primaries. The same thing happened in Wisconsin in a U.S. Senate seat.

We now see it happening in Congress where a sitting U.S. Congressman handpicks his successor. Of all successors, he picks a staffer. There is such contempt for the average people. I am sure these are people who have worked for years in the Democratic Party or years in various, different local elections. They are being shoved aside so that an insider can grab the slot.

Mr. Speaker, in any event, I thank my colleague from Washington for bringing this forward.

Mr. Speaker, it seems hard to believe that it is not even 10 days since Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

We all know why he was assassinated. He was assassinated in part because he stood by our Constitution and believed in the limited government that our forefathers wanted. He was also killed for his Christianity. I have come to realize he was far more of a religious leader than he was a political leader.

We have to now follow what he would have wanted, had he survived. I think that is two things. First of all, in America right now, church attendance was down. We can all be wonderful Christians without going to church, but it is a bad sign that church attendance was going down.

Let's all redouble our efforts to support our local churches. Look for Bible-believing churches, as Charlie Kirk wanted, and hopefully they will grow and thrive.

In Congress, let's try to get back one more time to the limited government that our Constitution so clearly demanded and stop asking the Federal Government to add another program after program after program, but instead, have the type of government that encourages self- reliance and strong families.

Mr. Speaker, I was at an event out of the building. Had I been present, I would have voted yea on Roll Call No. 272.

Mr. Speaker, tonight I will talk one more time about what I think is the most pressing problem facing America as we try to address the crime rate, the drug problem, and the education problem. It is a problem that was, sadly, not addressed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

As a matter of fact, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act went, to a certain extent, in the opposite direction. I want to educate the American public on this problem, and that is the breakdown of the traditional family with a man in the household over the last 60 years of America.

As this Congress tries to make America great again, it is hard to imagine America being that great if we continue to punish and penalize any family that has both parents at home.

America has changed dramatically. In the 1960s, about 5 percent of the children in this country were born into families without both a mother and father at home. I want to point out, I know families of all sorts of backgrounds. I know parents who have done a fantastic job of raising children in all backgrounds, and sometimes beyond their fault, there are families who appear to be doing a perfect job of raising their children, but nevertheless have a problem.

I think most Americans, though, with common sense would say it is more difficult for, say, the post-1995 generations, where 40 percent of American children are born without a mother and father at home, compared to the generation of children born in the 1960s, when that number was only 5 percent.

We have to ask ourselves why that happened. Sometimes when I talk to people back home, they mention the decline in religion, and maybe that is why we shot up from 5 percent to 40 percent.

Actually, if you look at programs the government authors, and I am going to reference George Gilder a little bit here, who was a great sociologist, if I can call him that, who wrote ``Wealth and Poverty'' in 1980. He looked at single-parent families to see if he had any observations. The families he looked at were specifically from the poorer parts of Albany, New York. At the time a woman got pregnant, if the family was not a married group, they began to collect benefits, and it was not a panic situation in which, how are we going to support the child? What are we going to do? Are we going to have to live with your parents? What are we going to do? It was kind of gleeful as they went from government office to government office getting their low-income housing, getting their free healthcare, getting their free college education if they wanted to go to college, food stamps, like I said, free apartment, which I think is the most generous giveaway of all.

Now, I don't know that it is good that we have created a situation in which a young person getting pregnant should be happy because of all the government benefits they are eligible for, but if you look at the eligibility requirements for every one of these programs, they are based on what we call percent of poverty. If you have somebody in the household--it could be a woman or it could be a man--if a man is in the household, you could penalize that family by easily $25,000 or $30,000 cash for having both parents at home.

An example of programs which fit the bill, which we penalize people for getting married, would be formerly called food stamps, certainly low-income housing, which by itself can be a benefit of over $12,000 a year; something called the earned income tax credit, which can easily be $6,000 or $7,000 a year, provided you work and keep your income under $17,000 or $16,000 a year.

If you do a little bit of work, unlike, say, if you had a sister who is married to a husband with a salary, you would get free childcare, childcare not available to a couple with two incomes.

There is a TANF program for people who aren't employed, giving free cash away. Again, it is much easier to get if you don't have a working parent in the household.

We have our child credit, which is, again, something that is phased out and appears to be designed to discourage people from getting married.

We have Pell grants--and I will tell you a story about that in a minute--a program that gives free college to a family without a working person.

Not surprising, if you spend some time talking to people who aren't at your country club fundraiser, spend some time talking to people who are not lobbyists, you will be surprised how many young people today are not getting married because they want that $25,000, $30,000 cash benefit that you get if you stay single and frequently don't have a man in the house.

I will also point out that frequently these benefits allow you to get benefits better than people who are working are getting. For example, it is a well-known thing, but if you talk to people, clerks at the local food store will tell you that people on food stamps are frequently buying things that the clerk in the food store cannot afford.

When it comes to low-income housing, particularly because we have a horrible program called the low-income housing tax credit program, the government incentivizes developers to build housing that costs $300,000, $400,000, or, in some cases, over a million dollars per unit, in which some people will be able to live, provided their income is low enough. You will find out what a person working for me once found out.

She got married, and she and her new husband were looking for a new apartment. They found what they felt were the nicest apartments in Madison, Wisconsin, were the low-income apartments. Not only do you get a free apartment, but it is superior to the apartments that other people are paying for.

With regard to childcare, I have heard a childcare provider say that she preferred to get the vouchers--and I don't know if this is always true; I have heard a mixed bag--but get vouchers from somebody from the government because those were always paid.

Childcare is very expensive today. If you agree to take care of a child, maybe sometimes that family will not have enough income to pay for the child. If you are on the government dole, it is more consistent. You will always get the childcare credit.

With regard to college, I will tell you a story. I once gave this speech about 15 years ago in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and I wondered what the people would think of the marriage penalty. Most of the people who were listening to the speech were older people. It was a Tea Party group, and they, of course, all agreed with me that it was scandalous that we were bribing somebody $25,000 a year not to get married.

I asked a gal who was present in the room that night--her job was a bartenderess--what she thought about these programs in which you would get a benefit, not only if you didn't get married, but an even larger benefit if you didn't work too hard. She said she got married before she had a baby, but a lot of her friends preferred not to get married before they had a baby because they got free college. In other words, one more time we had a situation in which this woman--and I found there were other people in the same boat making the same observation.

Young people going to college--kind of hard to believe, but it is true--may decide not to get married because they get the Pell grant, another poorly designed program, and get it to pay for either all or part of their college.

You may say: Is this all on purpose? Did the government design these programs to destroy the American family? Who would do that?

Let's not forget that Karl Marx, a socialist who is looked up to in some universities, said one of his goals was to abolish the family.

More recently, in 1960, a woman who has been described as the mother of women's studies--which is a major we make fun of in college. Nevertheless, it is something that a lot of kids take as an elective. Kate Millett, the mother of these classes, said: The complete destruction of the traditional marriage and the nuclear family is the utopian goal of feminism.

I have a feeling a lot of people don't realize that the utopian goal of feminism was to get rid of the nuclear family. Obviously, Kate Millett's successors are probably thrilled that we penalize married couples $25,000, $30,000 for getting married.

More recently, a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge--this is just what we call dictum. Nevertheless, she was a judge elected statewide. She said the notion that marriage serves as the foundation of the family is at best outdated and at worst misogynistic.

This is a woman who didn't, obviously, put that on her television commercials. It is interesting that a very liberal judge in the State of Wisconsin clearly had contempt for traditional marriage. Apparently, she maybe took some women's studies classes in college.

It seemed from her comments in this court case that she would be thrilled if traditional marriage was no longer the norm.

I talked to an Indian immigrant back home in my district. He made an interesting observation. Congressmen should go out of their way to talk to their immigrants because, frequently, they have observations as to what is going on in America that Americans who have been here their whole lives do not have. What he said is that, in America, the woman marries the government, and that is exactly true.

When we have a country in which the woman is encouraged to marry the government, the woman, the child, and the father pay a price. Children born in a difficult background like this are, by almost every standard, on average--and I realize there are examples of tremendous parents--on average, have a tougher go of it in life. They are going to struggle more in school. They are going to be more likely to use drugs. They are going to be more likely to commit crimes.

It is kind of interesting when I sit in committee hearings around here. We had a committee hearing on crime earlier this week. People look around for the causes, or this or that, of the problems we have, problems related to drug abuse, problems related to crime, maybe problems related to depression. They never talk about what the real problem is, the real problem being the breakdown of the family.

Does anybody doubt that if we still had a rate of fatherlessness in the home of--or a rate of intact families--back to 5 percent as we did in the 1960s, that our crime rate would drop like a stone? Does anybody think or not think that the number of--even though it can happen in the best of families--the number of people dying of drug abuse wouldn't fall? Does anybody think our education would improve if we had kids who are doing a better job of focusing at school?

It is high time, in the second bill that this Congress passes, that we begin to address this problem. We can't address it by giving every married couple $25,000 a year because we don't have that kind of money and would probably only encourage more people not to work very hard.

Mr. Speaker, by the way, I should mention, just as these programs discourage marriage, they all discourage work. I will mention the low- income housing tax credit program.

Mr. Speaker, I ran into somebody a couple of months ago. In order to be eligible for these very nice apartments, they could make only so much money. I will speculate that this person was making, say, $50,000 a year. If they got a second job, they had to be aware that their rent would go up.

In this country, particularly with the low-income housing tax credit, we penalize people who work hard. I think that is horrible public policy, but that is what we do.

Mr. Speaker, in any event, when the next reconciliation package comes through, I strongly hope that the Republican leadership, rather than allowing something like the low-income housing tax credit to go through and be expanded, of all things, Republican leadership recognizes this is a problem.

Even if they don't care if a man is in the house or not, at least they shouldn't penalize him. They shouldn't hate families in which a man and woman are raising their children together. I think that should be the number one priority of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, the second issue that I will take on is that we passed a defense authorization bill last week that I think had a serious problem. I would hope our slumbering press corps would do a little bit more work on the problem.

Elon Musk and DOGE were here. They did a good job pointing out that there were some, particularly in offices, Federal employees in the District of Columbia, or even around the country, that maybe weren't working that hard. Some of this happens in the private sector. More likely, it will happen in the public sector.

Right now, we have about 80,000 employees--I think a little bit under that; it might be 76,000--in the Department of Defense who are non- uniformed. I assume most of these employees are not people who cut the lawn or something. Most of these employees are in an office, and at least Elon Musk seemed to point out that a lot of them might not be working that hard.

Under the defense authorization, they anticipate, over the next year, the number of non-uniformed employees will drop by maybe another 30,000 or 40,000. When DOGE was riding high, I think one would have expected this number to drop more like 200,000 or 300,000.

I then asked the Department of Defense to, as quickly as possible, put together a proposal and say what would happen if they had to make do with only 400,000 or 450,000 non-uniformed employees in the Department of Defense. I will point out that a lot of these employees are making over $100,000 or $150,000 a year, with anecdotal evidence that they do very little.

One of the reasons Congress is so irresponsible is our press corps is asleep. I hope our press corps digs into this situation a little bit and publicizes how many people are working in desk jobs in the Pentagon, desk jobs in which they are not in uniform, and questions whether this is really necessary. We can then see whether there are significant savings here.

Of course, some of the money will not go to reducing our debt. Insofar as we find excess people around here, I think we are not prepared enough in this country for hypersonic missiles. I don't think we have an Iron Dome-type Israel situation in which we are prepared for other sorts of missiles.

I think the reason we are not prepared is that there are way too many people who are not working as hard as they could in the Pentagon. I am going to ask the press corps to wake up and ask people about that.

I will also ask the press corps to wake up and ask Congress whether it is appropriate that we penalize married couples by $25,000 or $35,000 a year because they got married, as opposed to their siblings who may not have gotten married.

Mr. Speaker, there is one other thing I want to comment on tonight. I was listening to a television program on one of the big conservative networks, and I listened to a commentator make fun of socialism. She talked about how much better capitalism was. I don't think she has a good handle on why capitalism is good.

First of all, we ought to require all defenders of capitalism to not call capitalism ``capitalism.'' We ought to call it a free-market economy. The major reason we would rather live in a country with a free-market economy than in a country that is a socialist economy is the government has so much more power in a socialist country than a free-market economy.

In a socialist economy, or as we work toward a more socialist economy, a larger segment of the population works for the government. As an elected official, I have noticed in my time that, frequently, people who work for the government are afraid to speak openly to me about problems in their field.

Mr. Speaker, I am thinking a substitute teacher would be afraid to give me a campaign contribution because they worked for a school district that was hostile to Republicans. They felt they would be discriminated against if they knew they gave money to a Republican politician.

There are people who worked for the Department of Natural Resources in Wisconsin, which is the equivalent of the EPA in Washington, who tell me about problems in their department but caution me that they could never cite them. What they were telling me had to be secret because they worked for the government and because they were afraid the government would discriminate against somebody who backed the party, the less government party, the Republican Party.

In a free-market economy, we can rent from whoever we want. In a socialist state, all the property is owned by the government. Right now, my office is in a place called Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. If I want to live in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, first of all, I pay rent. I am guessing that in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, there are maybe 400 different landlords. The landlords compete for the rental dollar.

I have the ability to buy my own house, paint my house whatever color I want, and maintain my lawn in whatever fashion I want. That is something we do in a free-market economy.

In a socialist economy, the government runs everything. If I want to rent a dwelling, I have to rent from the government. If the government doesn't like me, if I have said the wrong thing, or if I have said something that is politically incorrect, they may say they will not rent to me. They might also give me an inferior place.

The same thing applies to food. In a free-market economy, my guess is, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a city of only about 35,000 people, I bet there are 150 places where I can go to eat and have something made for me.

In a socialist economy, something that the gentleman who is running for mayor of New York would like--I guess he would like only one type of grocery store. There would only be one sort of restaurant because all the restaurants are run by the government.

First of all, since they are owned by the government, they don't have to compete into a better job because they are never going to go through bankruptcy. Secondly, because they are owned by the government, the government determines what fare is offered. They determine how many restaurants we have that will serve Italian fare or Mexican or what have you. It is much better in a free economy.

Even more importantly, in a socialist economy, we have to work for the government. The more people who have to work for the government, the less freedom they have. If we have to work for the government and the government is all-powerful, as it is in a socialist state, the government determines whether we keep our jobs, whether we are promoted in our jobs, or whether or not we get raises.

Mr. Speaker, it is all determined by a government that may look down on us if we are critical of the central planning authority. That is a big difference between a free-market economy and a socialist economy.

Mr. Speaker, in a socialist economy, you do not have to do well because you are owned by the government, or if you have a restaurant that has crummy food or you have a factory in which the people are not working very hard, because apparently some people are not working very hard for the Department of Defense, you do not get in trouble for that.

Because it is a socialist economy, everybody becomes poorer because there is no incentive to work that much harder. You can't lose your job, Mr. Speaker, because everybody is working for the government. That is another reason why life is so much better in a free market economy.

I think people like being free better. When you talk about testimonials in the old Soviet Union, Mr. Speaker, and probably to this day because the work ethic hasn't changed enough, you run into a lot of very unhappy people because they are stuck in an economic system in which they have to work for the government.

As a matter of fact, I know a friend who went to Cuba. It was an interesting observation. In Cuba, which is an island country, he noticed that there were no, or almost no, boats on the docks as he went around the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a sign of what happens in a socialist state. People are so unhappy there that they won't allow them to

get on boats and go into the Gulf of Mexico to somewhere else. They have got to force the people to stay at home.

In any event, I think in the future when we explain to the younger people why we like a free market economy rather than a socialist economy, we should emphasize the freedom that comes with a free market economy, the freedom to pick one of hundreds of employers in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, or if you want to get around the whole country, one of hundreds of thousands of employers. You have the ability to rent or buy a home wherever you want, Mr. Speaker, not where you are restricted by where the government is. You have the ability when you go to a retail outlet to have people competing for your sales dollar so there are a lot of opportunities to buy this item of clothing or these appliances or whatnot, as opposed to in a socialist state where the government determines what the government bureaucrats think you need.

Finally, of course, you are overwhelmingly wealthier because in a free market economy, Mr. Speaker, you are free to work hard, and you are free to open up your own business. By doing that, all of society is wealthier, as opposed to the socialist state in which everybody has to work for the government. There is no guaranteed incentive for working harder. If you think of a better way to do business, Mr. Speaker, you are not allowed to set up business on your own. All you can do is make a suggestion to your boss, and if he doesn't care to take your suggestion on how the business can improve, well, Mr. Speaker, then it just never improves.

This is why the socialist state in old Russia, the old Soviet Union, was so ineffective.

In any event, to summarize tonight, first of all, I really hope Republican leadership and President Trump begin to address the $25,000 penalty this country imposes on any married couple with children.

Secondly, I hope Republicans point out when they talk about the difference between socialism and what they refer to as capitalism, that the major difference is the freedom that comes from a free market economy.

Finally, I hope the press corps pays attention to the huge number of non-uniformed employees in the Department of Defense and what the current administration is doing about it.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 33 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 18, 2025, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.